Sometimes I say things that seem obvious and uncontroversial to me and am then surprised by the strong opposition they arouse. One such statement was in yesterday’s post where I strongly defended Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning and added that president Obama “has not (as least as yet) tried to kidnap Snowden or kill him with a Navy Seal operation or a drone strike but you can bet that it is among the possibilities that are being considered.” This aroused some strong reactions both in the comments and privately and I thought I would try and understand why this might be so. [Read more…]

Both Venezuela and Nicaragua have made offers of asylum to Edward Snowden.

[Venezuelan president Nicolas] Maduro said Venezuela was ready to offer him sanctuary, and that the details Snowden had revealed of a US spy program had exposed the nefarious schemes of the US “empire”.

“He has told the truth, in the spirit of rebellion, about the US spying on the whole world,” Maduro said.

[Read more…]

Supporters of the Obama administration and the national security state make three arguments in support of its widespread snooping. One is that what the NSA and other government agencies have been doing legal, something that Jennifer Stisa Granick and Christopher Jon Sprigman vigorously dispute. Another is that there is judicial oversight from the federal judges of the FISA court, which has been revealed as pretty much a rubber stamp rather than a watchdog. [Read more…]

We tend to view international politics in terms of horizontal divisions with nation states competing with each other at various levels that can on occasion lead to conflicts. Sometimes this split can be taken advantage of by playing one country against the other. But in the case of Edward Snowden we see even countries that are not particularly friendly to the US closing ranks and being reluctant to give him asylum. Even South American countries who are furious at what the US and Western European countries did to the Bolivian president’s plane still have not accepted him. [Read more…]

I was amused by how some students in the language program at the University of Wisconsin treated a pair of recruiters from the NSA who were looking for people for their language analyst program. The audio in that link is much better at getting a feel for the exchanges than the transcript. [Read more…]

It is obvious that the US government is taking extraordinary measures in trying to capture Edward Snowden, from revoking his passport, using massive pressure and threats of retribution to those countries that might seek to give him asylum, to the incredible step of forcing the Bolivian president’s plane to land in Austria. President Obama might say publicly that he is not going to go out of his way to get Snowden back to the US but it is clear that he is throwing all the massive power that he has at his disposal in pursuit of this goal. He has not (as least as yet) tried to kidnap Snowden or kill him with a Nave Seal operation or a drone strike but you can bet that it is among the possibilities that are being considered. [Read more…]

LeVar Burton is a much-beloved actor, well known for his roles in Star Trek and Roots. But I watched him most along with my children when he was the host of Reading Rainbow. In this clip, he describes what he has to do to avoid being shot and killed if he is subjected to even a routine traffic stop, things that would have never occurred to me to do. Then Tim Wise compares that with his own experiences with the police as a young white man. [Read more…]

I have written before about the hunger strike being waged by over a hundred of the prisoners at Guantanamo and that the government is force-feeding them, a practice that is widely condemned as barbaric, as anyone would agree when one reads the description of it by one of the prisoners subjected to it. [Read more…]

(Via Xeni Jardin)

On this July 4th holiday when the nation goes through the annual ritual of celebrating its history and praising itself for the freedoms it gained from the British 237 years ago, it is sobering to realize that it has, almost casually, allowed the government to gut those very freedoms leaving just a brittle, hollowed-out shell that looks good on paper but has little or no substance.
[Read more…]